(2010-2019)

It’s 2020. I’m 47 years old. I remember when I was a child, the year 2000 seemed like a Science Fictionally distant impossibility, trying to imagine what it would be like to be an adult in an age with teleports, personal butler robots, and the skies filled with flying cars that have revolutionized travel. Now, today is twenty years beyond that once-faraway date, and things are not anything like I’d imagine they’d be.

No teleports. Siri and Alexa are the closest I can get to a personal butler robot, and both my feet are still planted on terra firma for all my localized travel. Yet, I doubt my 1984 self would believe me if my 2020 self reported that today I’d carry in my front pocket a computer just a bit larger than an index card, and on it, I could:

• watch virtually any movie , TV show, or live media I’d ever want at any time I wanted
• have a real-time video conversation with someone virtually anywhere in the world
• have access to virtually any of history’s information within a few taps on a screen
• play a multitude of games with virtually anyone on any other part of the globe
• catalog all my life’s events in photos, videos, and text and coordinate it with the catalog of other people’s, in real-time
• do so much more, if I can just keep from accidentally dropping it in the toilet when I’m clumsily flushing.

New accomplishments and advances make it easy to be so amazed at where we are and where we’re going that we take for granted from where we’ve come. I can remember when my phone number was just 4 digits and our phone was a shared “party line” with the neighbors down the road. Today, everyone in my family has their own 10-digit number, even when we’re all in the same room together. Moreover, we’ve taken detailed pictures of the solar system, explored Mars, and discovered the sequence of DNA. Admittedly that’s a pretty liberal use of “we” here, but you get my point.

It happens on the grand, global scale and it happens on the small family and individual scales, too. There’s this little sentence tucked away in the first few sentences of the Bible’s story of Ruth that cause me to appreciate this tendency to lose the tree for the forest (don’t worry, this blog entry isn’t a Bible study):

1 In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. ² The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem,Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.³ Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. ⁴ They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, ⁵ both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

Ruth 1:1-5, NIV

I bolded it so you wouldn’t miss it. It’s such a throw-away detail, but perhaps because its 2020 and the turn of a new decade, it seems to carry more weight than just a heavier font might indicate. This story opens with a scant flyover introduction to this Jewish man and his family who moved to a foreign land because of a drought. Within 3 sentences, 2 marriages, 3 deaths and 10 years pass. I understand that it’s a summary supplied to bring the reader current. It also strikes me just how much life ends up getting lived in a span of 10 years. Life that often gets proverbially packed into the hyphen between the two dates listed. I suppose if you were to ask Naomi, she may not be so summarily flippant about those 10 years. In that decade:

• She as a younger woman moved her family in desperation to a strange land with unknown customs, simply to survive. Surely that was no easy re-lo.
• She saw her boys become men, moving out of childhood into adulthood.
• She experienced the death of her husband, leaving her in this foreign community without her closest companion.
• She welcomed two new Gentile women into her family, daily navigating the new relationships where cultures, faiths, traditions, and beliefs all collided.
• She shepherded these two young daughters-by-marriage through their own grief of loving their spouses, even amidst dealing with her own sense of loss over the death of her sons.

While the overlay isn’t exact to the calendar decade, this new decade will conclude my 40s decade and oversee most of my 50s. In our (Kelli & mine) 40s, we’ve seen our kids become adults, our home begin its transition from a hub of constant activity to a nest empty of its hatchlings. While we’ve enjoyed the stability of our ministries and our clear sense that God has placed us here, we’ve also been challenged by the distance from loved ones. In this decade past, we’ve walked through and (by God’s grace) overcome a cancer diagnosis. We’ve lived 3,652 days (and counting) of living during that decade…days marked by all the same things that uniquely distinguish all of our days: love, joy, accomplishment, success, renewal, victory, but also sadness, setback, failure, disappointment, discouragement, and loss.

I’m grayer than I was, but not as gray as I’m going to be. Hopefully, I’m wiser than I was, but not as wise as I will be in the future. I so look forward to my own kids’ marriages. I look forward to their welcoming children into their families. I look forward to continuing to be useful in the things that God is doing all around me. I look forward to meeting new people, making new friends, facing new challenges, learning new lessons, and growing in new ways (that at times will certainly be painful). To be sure, the fullness of having lived the life that is now behind me causes me to reflect; but mostly, I look forward.